Morgan's Corner: No distortion too big for Fox News and other right-wing media

View full sizeStar-Ledger photoIn this Feb. 17, 1996 photo, NYU Law professor Derrick Bell talks about conditions for African-Americans today as compared to 1878 when U.S. Supreme Court issued its "seperate but equal" decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Discussion took place at the Paul Robeson Center at Rutgers Newark.

The recently deceased former Harvard Law School Professor Derrick Bell was certainly a controversial figure in his day, but hardly the radical he's currently being branded by some in the right-wing media.

Bell began his public career in 1952 as one of the few black attorneys working for the U.S. Department of Justice, then resigned rather than relinquish his membership in the NAACP. It seemed that some of his superiors in the department thought his membership in the civil rights organization would be seen in certain circles as a conflict of interest.

Almost as if to say up yours, Bell then took a job working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he reportedly was involved in 300 school segregation cases. Those were the days when Thurgood Marshall and his stalwart band of litigators readied themselves for the groundbreaking Brown vs. Board of Education decision that ended official segregation in the nation's public schools.

There's no doubt that just about wherever Bell's professional career took him controversy followed, controversy he was responsible for instigating. So, after becoming the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School in 1969, Bell led a hunger strike to protest the lack of diversity in the rest of the university system.
It was during a campus protest that the young president of Harvard Law Review, Barack Obama, stepped forward to introduce himself to Bell and the two men embraced momentarily.

That embrace was considered a "gotcha" moment by the late blogger Andrew Breitbart, who was responsible for releasing the infamous Shirley Sherrod video last year, erroneously claiming to expose Ms. Sherrod, then an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, confessing, at an NAACP affair no less, that she discriminated against a white couple seeking the agency's assistance.

When the truth finally emerged, Sherrod was exonerated, but not before she was fired and roundly castigated by NAACP officials, who had to later offer her an apology, as did both her bosses -- the secretary of Agriculture and the president of the United States.

You'd think after that bit of nastiness Fox News would be wary of doing business with Breitbart, who passed away suddenly a few weeks ago. But no, Fox commentator Sean Hannity jumped right into the fray claiming the Bell video clip as proof that Obama is plugged into a network of black extremists who want to destroy America.

In reality, Bell was only following the exhortation of the famous black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who when asked on his death bed what his comrades should do to continue his fight supposedly said "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!" Bell lived, worked and wrote in that tradition, a tradition of using the law, the courts, and protest to challenge racial segregation and oppression. We just celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for doing exactly that.

But there's Hannity on TV, at one point with Sarah Palin, babbling incoherently, accusing Obama of being anti-civil rights, anti-American and wanting, somehow, to take the country back to pre-Civil War days. Why would anyone black want to do that?

You'd think Palin, whose vice presidential candidacy was a direct consequence of the civil rights struggle that eventually morphed into the women's movement, might take a broader view of some things Bell espoused. But alas, in the current political climate, whatever Obama is for, Hannity and Palin see it as their duty to be against -- no matter how irrational their opposition might be.